I

Sex with you feels like survivor’s guilt. What were we but two figures at a bar sharing a gentle kiss and a Molotov Cocktail? I run my hand down your back like a train derailing off its tracks. This exchange of ecstasy will ripple chaos into this city—our city. When your lips touch my skin a trigger is pulled, a body hits the pavement, a splash of blood arcs in streetlamp glow. Two beings like us are not meant to feel passion—at least, not together. Every time we fuck we sacrifice a city block. Let’s call this what it is.

II

Ashes mingled with sweat, smeared on our bodies like archangels going into battle, smells of scorched ecstasy. The city burns around us, people die in back alleys. No shame in out act; we know the price that it brings. And still we lick, we tease, I hold you down, you dig your nails into my flesh, drawing blood. I draw you near, skyscrapers crumble to the street. The faster we go, the closer the fire inches towards us…going slower only makes it burn more intense. How we’re still alive remains a mystery to me.

III

A ruined, desolate place we have created. Passion turned to fire turned to flood. Endless night—the sun has collapsed for us, the stars have gone dark. Debris of the cosmos becomes our bedding ground. And we rest. Nothing left to destroy, we collapse in exhaustion on the bones of a once populace place. No loneliness, no regret. Just our bodies and the darkness. I feel your breath on my neck…slowly we recover. Nothing left to destroy. Shift our positions. Create light.

– Roman Colombo

Author’s Note: “Beautiful Disaster” started as a one paragraph prose poem for a class with Flash Fiction master Randall Brown. Not being a poet, I tapped into they style I write best in—noir, which is basically sex, violence, and darkness. It was a piece I was always in love with, but never felt I had completed. The second two movements (doesn’t feel right to call them stanzas) came later, and then felt complete. The poem also solidified my noir tendencies, seeing it as not just a style to tell a story, but also a language in itself. There is no plot to this piece, just the prose. Noir is more than just plot; it’s plot with a style that is poetry.